Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a cruise control system for vehicles, in particular for motor vehicles.
The automatic control of vehicles is a goal worth striving for. In this field, adaptive cruise control (ACC) is playing an increasingly significant role because it permits the automatically controlled vehicle to react to obstacles and/or moving objects that may be encountered. In conventional ACC systems a sensor is provided which determines a distance and a velocity of an object located in a sensing range of the sensor. The distance data and the velocity data relating to the detected object are used to regulate the velocity of the vehicle only if the detected object is unambiguously identified as being located in a path of the vehicle.
A cruise control system that operates in this way has the disadvantage that the way in which the vehicle is controlled by the cruise control system is unsteady and unpleasant for passengers.
Published, Non-Prosecuted German Patent Application DE 196 14 061 A1 discloses a cruise control system for motor vehicles in which the probability of any object determined by the sensor device to be on the same path is determined and a target vehicle traveling ahead, from which target vehicle a constant distance is to be maintained, is selected as a function of the probability of traveling on the same path. The probability of traveling on the same path is dependent here on the size and the severity of a bend and on the relative position and the relative speed of a sensed object with respect to the system vehicle.